PROSPERO,
OR THE TEMPEST ISLAND

PR-EVOLUTION DANCE COMPANY

How obvious is it to adapt a Shakespeare play in the year of the 400th anniversary of his death? Possibly it suggested itself to be included in our repertoire because the play has something to tell us today, something that might be relevant to people nowadays? When someone is offended, betrayed or deceived, they feel anger, rage, disappointment, bitterness, pain and revenge, even all at once. Most likely, everyone could extend the list, and perhaps everyone has a personal list deep inside, from tempests in a teapot to true tsunamis devastating the soul. If we take a closer look, the story of Prospero can suddenly appear at any point in our everyday lives. It may have happened to you that people who are close to you, even friends, questioned your values, labelled you, rejected you, thus excluding you from their worlds.

We explore our world based on The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play, which sums up the essence of the happenings and characteristics of the soul. When you least expect it, it happens. Is the situation familiar? Are we able to rise above our resentment, and truly let go of sin and the sinner, and see something more in life?

Our location is the Tempest Island, where the energies of the intellectual and the instinctive worlds collide to finally put an end to betrayal. However, Prospero does not only want to create order in his environment but also wants to take account of his inner world, addressing the transience of life. Beyond people’s instinctive and conscious struggles, he finds the path to hope in love, but it is not given to him by life, but to his daughter Miranda.
Prospero, who built his own world in the solitude of the island, is ready to revaluate his decisions in order to pass on to the next generation a treasure that could help future generations to improve their environments and how they relate to other fellow human beings.